Timasomo 2023: Roll Call
October 1st has already hit in some parts of the world, so Timasomo has officially begun!
Posting in this thread is your official entry into Timasomo. Let everyone know what your actual plans are: what are you going to make?
Once the date turns over to October 1st wherever you are in the world, feel free to start creating!
FAQs
What is Timasomo really though?
Timasomo (Tildes’ Make Something Month) is a chance to create something/anything!
There are no restrictions on what you can choose to make.
The best way to get a feel for Timasomo is to check out the previous showcase threads:
These showcases are the culminating event of Timasomo -- a public gallery of participants' creations. Each item in the showcases was a project that community members chose to complete for the event.
In the weeks leading up to the showcase, discussion threads will be posted where people can share their progress.
Can I participate?
Yes! Timasomo is open to anyone on Tildes! Please make sure you are subscribed to ~creative.timasomo.
The greater Tildes community is also encouraged to participate in discussion threads even if you are not actively working towards a creative goal. This is meant to be an inclusive community event -- all are welcome!
If you are interested in participating but do not have a Tildes login, please e-mail the invite request address here for an invite to the community.
How do I sign up?
Make sure you are subscribed to ~creative.timasomo.
On October 1st, there will be a Roll Call thread. By posting your plans to participate in that thread, you have formally signed up for Timasomo!
Didn't it used to be in November?
Yes. Timasomo was originally inspired by NaNoWriMo, the National Novel Writing Month, which takes place in November.
Initially, I wanted people participating in NaNoWriMo to be able to share their work with Timasomo as well. In the entire time it has run, however, no participant has publicly submitted any work from NaNoWriMo to Timasomo. Instead, Timasomo has gained its own identity independent of NaNoWriMo.
Many participants from previous years have shared that October would be a better month for them personally, so we moved the event to October.
Also, the event was so fantastically popular that it regularly upstaged American Thanksgiving, thus we only felt it fair that Canadian Thanksgiving be targeted as well.
What are the rules?
Timasomo is self-driven and its goals are self-selected.
On October 1st, participants will commit to a creative project (or projects) that they plan to complete within the month of October.
There is no restriction on the methods/products of creativity: writing, painting, code, food, photos, crafts, songs -- if it's creative expression for you, it works for Timasomo!
Though most will be participating individually, collaborations are welcome too!
What is the schedule?
Timasomo begins October 1st and ends October 31st.
All creative output towards your goal(s) should be confined to this time.
This week prior to the start of October is for planning. There will be a few days at the beginning of November given to "finishing touches" before we have our final thread, which will be a showcase of all the completed works.
Below are the dates that I will be posting weekly threads:
Sunday, October 1, 2023: Roll Call Thread
Sunday, October 8, 2023: Update Thread #1
Sunday, October 15, 2023: Update Thread #2
Sunday, October 22, 2023: Update Thread #3
Sunday, October 29, 2023: Final Update Thread
Sunday, November 5, 2023: Timasomo Showcase Thread
Do I have to share my creation(s) publicly?
Tildes is a privacy-respecting site, and you are not obligated to share your creation here if you do not want to. We'd still love to hear about it though, if you're willing to share process and details!
Is it Timasomo or TiMaSoMo?
Either.
I personally use "Timasomo" because I think it looks cleaner and because too much time on the internet has made my brain incapable of reading "TiMaSoMo" as anything other than sarcasm, but go with whichever you prefer.
The best option, however, is “𝑻𝑰𝑴𝑨𝑺𝑶𝑴𝑶” for reasons that are self-evident.
Well, nobody in the other thread told me not to, and a few crazy people actually said they wanted this thing, so I guess I'd better try!
I'll be creating a text editor that doesn't allow you to go back and edit your text. Pure typewriter mode. It will hopefully be helpful for people who need to silence their inner critic and just get that first draft done. It will almost certainly be infuriating to use.
For those who said they want this, a couple of people in the other thread suggested alternatives that already exist and probably have better features and support, and I found one or two others around online as well. You probably want to use one of those instead, but I do hope to have something usable by the end of the month.
I made at least thirteen edits to this comment as I was writing it.
I laughed at this, maybe you can write your code in it once it's in a usable state ;)
I have been looking for that for a long time. There are actually no good options for Windows. I'll probably use your program ;)
Just make it look nice and centered on large screens. I don't like when my lines have like 250 characters :P
I am also a habitual editor. I'm really curious to see how this turns out!
I do have a programmable keyboard and this has me wondering if it'd be worth the effort to create a "writing" profile which disables editing shortcuts, since I use those vastly more than I use the mouse. Seems like I'd need to disable backspace/delete, arrow keys, page up/down, home/end, .... not sure if there's anything else.
As an exercise for myself I didn't edit this comment except for spelling mistakes. Well, I almost did, except I wrote "edit this comment at all except -" and then removed the "at all" part. I almost made it to the end, damn.
I'm in. I plan to make a... actually I don't know what they're called. A layered 2D wooden scene? It's like what people do in shadowboxes -- multiple layers of wooden cutouts to emulate depth in a scene. Something like this.
Anyway, the scene I want to do is the streets of Yarnham, from From Software's Bloodborne. Gothic building cityscapes for the background layers, maybe some beasts and a hunter too. It'll be a highly simplified version -- I don't own a band saw -- but it should be fun to try out!
This sounds so cool, Bloodborne is probably my favourite game of all time so I can't wait to see what you make!
I will be working on a Pi based system for monitoring my plant’s soil moisture levels and distributing water if necessary. I’ve ordered the components but some won’t turn up before mid month. The system should be battery and solar powered.
I'm in!
I plan to work on a comic called "Life After Dad" about, well, life after my dad died. It's been on my mind for a bit, so this is a good reason to actually make it.
Ok. I’m in. I want to update my website and maybe write a blogpost or two. I want to have something out there on the web and have been meaning to for ages. I’m viewing it as an opportunity to maybe write some thoughts on things i’m reading, and a way to practice my CSS and who knows what else.
I'm going to try! I'm hoping it's going to be better for my mental health to finally work on something creative.
I'm going to make a cat house/tree (depending on how high I can make it) out of materials I already have. I have a lot of boxes and craft material. I just want to reuse and reduce waste I've got. So it might still end up looking quite shoddy but that's okay. As long as the cat likes it.
Also, If there's time, I'd like to do at least 1 small watercolour piece.
Definitely in. I've (mostly) finalised my design for a USB charging station and storage unit to go into our kitchen and make tidy the current rat's nest of cables and chargers and so on slowly expanding into the available space. I have materials and the equipment I need (or at least the tools to make the tools) and most of a plan about how to make it. There's quite a few aspects of the design that involve things I haven't done before but that just makes it more fun.
Obviously no plan survives contact with the
enemytrack saw, so things will no doubt change but that should be fine.I'm in! I want to write in-depth documentation about the Websocket API of Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup (DCSS) Webtiles, since I have a large part of it figured out due to my DCSS API library and (currently private) DCSS Rust Bot.
I’m going to do some knitting. At least three things, Woth am optional fourth/fifth:
I want to make something in the Godot engine. I'm an artist and my partner is a programmer, and we've both been wanting to learn it (driven largely by the recent Unity shenanigans) so the plan is to do a small, self contained project to help us learn the ropes. It won't be a game exactly, more like an interactive diorama.
So glad to see more people exploring Godot! I'm also working in the engine for Timasomo.
I’m in.
The project for this month is making H E A D S P A C E.
My place is way to cluttered at the moment. Things don’t have a place and surfaces are filled with stuff. There is a pile of papers that need filing and correspondence waiting to be answered.
Since I want to work on some artistic projects (photography and music) I need to significantly cut down on the mental load and get this stuff out of the way.
I was scrolling through feeling a little sad that I, member of a family of artists/musicians, have no particular skills in the creative fields to allow me to participate, but this sounds like a project I could get into. I know the clutter in my house worsens my mental health (and lowered mental health leads to me allowing more clutter: the Cycle of Doom) but it always sneaks back in and it's been at the tipping point for a while now.
I'm going to finish my Pentominoes SPA and hopefully also make another SPA, most likely of Symmetric Set (the card game Set, but you make the identity in Sn instead of Z_3^4 (thanks @KeepCalmAndScream for pointing out my mistake)) but possibly something else.
Pentominoes is in a state where it could be considered done tbh, but I want to add:
[0-9A-Za-n]; and then the case of the tile name can encode some information about which color is being used for that tile instead of lowercase == expect a 1-digit x-coordinate, uppercase == expect a 2-digit x-coordinate. And that way I can let the user have up to 12 colors (which is max possible needed) instead of just 6, right now the color is encoded along with the orientation in the 2nd character of each tile.Anyway, writing all of this out, that sort of seems like enough for a month...but we'll see haha
Hi, I'm familiar with Set, just curious how it maps to making the identity in Z_4? (I see how it maps to finding 3 elements that sum to the identity in (Z_3)^4, wondering how that works with S_n)
oh i typo! Yeah, it's totally Z_3^4, you're right.
With S_n, it's a completely different deck. Each card represents a permutation of elements, by drawing lines across them to reorder the elements - for S3, on the left side, you have A, B, C going down, and then you have a line from A to the 2nd output, from B to the 1st output, and the line from C goes straight across. So that leaves you with BAC. Then your 2nd card in the set could be top -> 3rd spot, middle -> 1st spot, bottom -> 2nd spot, and you're left with ACB. Finally, you have one that switches the bottom 2 elements, and you get back to ABC. So these 3 cards form a "set" because the full operation is the identity.
I don't love the game as much as I love Set honestly, because it's not really a game of visual perception anymore, but much more of a puzzle game, because you aren't going to recognize one of these things on the fly, you're really going to have to figure it out in your head each time. But I think it's a very interesting game to have a demo of!
Yeah I love Set too. As a spotting game Set has a close to ideal amount of visual complexity for me. Not too little that it's trivial to spot a Set, but also not too much so that you have to stop and "compute" whether something is a Set. It pushes close to the human limits of rapid pattern recognition.
Sounds like a cool idea, good luck! Might be interesting to explore different ways of visually representing permutations, a good one might bring it closer to spotting instead of computing. (A cycle notation mode might also be interesting for math nerds who want to compute.)
So the only way I can really think of representing permutations is with dots with their new order, assuming you previously were in the "identity" order (whatever that is). I decided to go with Red > Blue > Green and did some prototyping...it seems a lot harder to tell what's going on this way, than it is with the lines.
One thing I wanted to do though, was update coloring of the lines as you click on things, so you'd see something like this when it's WIP, making it a lot more obvious which last card you need to click after you've clicked the first 2. It would mean that cards change with time, but that sorta makes sense when you're dealing with nonabelian shit.
It doesn't have to be for just nonabelian groups, that helps whenever the result is hard to figure out.
Yeah the line-braid representation seems easiest to grasp visually (I can't think of anything better either). Instead of updating the whole board, another approach is to move the clicked on cards to the side and line them up, updating the coloring for just those.
This turns the game from spotting/computing to something that encourages much more trial and error though.
Planning to have that be a user preference! No matter what I'll update the colors for the cards you've already clicked on, and display them in a header area.
The color-only-what-youve-clicked version is actually what exists in the only implementation of Symmetric Set I know of. But this has soooooooooo many animations & you can't turn them off that I really don't enjoy playing it at all.
One game mechanic it has that I do like though, is that the deck is seemingly infinite, I think it actually rng picks N cards to readd instead of actually having a deck. I might go with that, or have an option between deck & infinite play.
(I say all of this but I'm still working on pentominoes so we'll see if I ever get past this one! hah)
My goal: make at least one custom beat map for a song in Beat Saber, playable from start to finish, on one difficulty level
In theory, I would love to do more than this (multiple difficulty levels, multiple songs) but my time is very limited this month, so I’m going to aim low. I also have no idea how long it will take me to actually learn the mapping software and process. I’m hoping it’s wonderfully easy and I can effortlessly bang out several songs once I get the hang of things. If anyone here has any experience or insight to offer, let me know!
I’m beginning the process by making some S P A C E for myself. My VR computer is on a desk that is drowning in clutter (I have to move piles of stuff when I turn it on because they’re sitting on the poor keyboard and pressing down keys (yes, I know this is a sin)). Thus, I’m decluttering and setting up my workspace at the beginning of this week, as well as doing some small amount of digital prep work (choosing songs, converting them to WAVs, getting them on my VR computer).
I then have a trip for the later half of the week and this weekend where I’ll be away and unable to work on anything. It won’t be until next week that I’m actually able to start in earnest.
Me! I am working on ornaments for my family using buttons from my grandma's button jar. She passed away two years ago and I wanted to do this to honor her memory. She collected angels and I really want to turn the buttons into angels.
I have most of the remaining supplies. This first week is figuring out what I need and maybe a prototype?
I'm in!
Same thing as last year -- a remix or a piece of music. Haven't picked the source material yet but I'm eyeing Bruises by Lewis Capaldi or a Petite Biscuit track :)
Good luck to everyone participating!
I plan on making some patches! I've had the idea to make these colourful, layered applique patches with stitches overtop. It's hard to explain but they'll be messy and grungy and hopefully pretty cool! I have some ideas in mind and in October I'd like to get some plans drawn up and try making let's say... at least 5 designs. Can't wait to show some off instead of trying to describe them lol.
I’d like to write and record a guitar solo over a pop song, I’m a very casual player who has noodled around for over a decade without any consistent practice. I know all the common chords and some scales but I suck!
I have a fender strat, some pedals, an audio interface and GarageBand, so I should be good to go.
I am thinking of something like this:
https://youtube.com/shorts/tb37pId0AGU?feature=shared
A'ight. Let's do this. I'm a musical performer with terrible self-censure when trying to write. I'm going to write and record a song.
You and me both, I'm also trying to supress my inner music critic this month. Good luck!
Throwing my hat in:
I'm going to write a two-track EP exploring space, specifically focused on the discomfort I feel around large dark objects taking up a large field of view. It's not a large-object thing, but dark objects. I don't know what it's going to be, but I'll know when I hear it.
As far as workflow, I'm taking a A/B side approach: One track on my Dirtywave M8, and one via LSDJ, via my Analogue Pocket. This will simplify the project, let me use two outlets I need to give more attention to, and allow me to achieve interesting results.
I intend to make some album art but don't usually work in visual media. I'm thinking of drafting something in Inkscape that brings up the feeling, using few colors with large shapes, and see where it takes me.
Going to give it a shot.
I'd like to finish the first draft of a Choose Your Own Adventure story I've been planning for a few years.
It's a short horror story called The Monster Machine and it's a mix of Goosebumps, SCP and X-Files. I tend to overwhelm myself with all the elements that that go into making a VN/CYOA story, so I just want to focus on just the text this time.
Will use Ink Script and the goal would be to draft out the "canon" path and main branches.
I think instead of just committing to music, I want this to be an exploration of my own creativity.
So the challenge: be creative, every day, for the entire month.
This can be either working 15+ minutes on music, writing a short story, drawing something or going out and shooting some photos.
However, music remains the main focus, so I need to finish 1 track, just one. Draw a cover art or use one of the photos I've shot over the month, and "release" it by uploading it publicly, no matter how trash it ends up being.
In the end, I want to figure out if music is the best creative outlet for me, or if I've been suppressing everything else instead.
I'm going to be making a simple economic/incremental game in Haxe. It'll be text-only output, keyboard-only input. There will probably be a hex/square grid, rendered via characters on a console. No art, solely focused on code.
I'm a hobby coder. More importantly perhaps, I want to improve how I go about writing code and enjoy the process more:
Long-winded rambling
- try to make something larger than my previous projects. When I write object-oriented code, I overanalyze and spend too much time thinking and planning and being unhappy with the choices I make and redoing things. That isn't very effective when I end up making few choices and get little done. I'd like to work past the overthinking, but the code should still be decently organized.I have very few of the rules figured out right now. I want to try to get past overthinking here and consistently keep building, instead of getting hung up on figuring out everything completely first
share it with other people. No one else has seen my personal projects so far. Uncomfortable about it for a few reasons. One of them is that I'm basically completely self-taught, I'm pretty sure there are lots of problems with how I go about writing code.
learn and use version control. This is one of the problems, up till now I've only used manual backups. Never felt I had to work with a codebase large enough to require it. I'll probably go with GitHub for this and the previous goal.
overcome some fears and difficulties, or at least identify them. I like writing code, logic and algorithms generally aren't a problem, but I've struggled inordinately with things like overthinking, C++, particularly working memory issues (e.g. I need to change things in these places. After dealing with the first few, I forget about the rest. If I'm lucky, it won't compile. If I'm not, there might be a sneaky bug that I'll have to figure out later.)
Gonna make S P A C E too.
I'll be writing something and recording something, but I might back out of sharing since I'm not a writer and definitely not an, uh, recorder. And it'll be a little navel-gazing from someone I knew as a kid.
Thanks for putting this together!
I'm in! One of my career goals is to get into teaching / mentoring, but starting there is non trivial.
The most impactful thing I can do right now is to finally start that technical blog I have been procrastinating for a while. My plan for October is to:
I'm in. I have an in-joke with /u/justahousecat that the United States Postal Service is a manifestation of Cthulhu and we have joked about creating a piece of Bizarro fiction by editing The Call of Cthulhu and self-publishing but never yet done it. I have decided to make that happen this month. I make no assurances as to quality, this is a private joke first and foremost but I hope someone here will find it interesting.
I'm interested! Big fan of bizarro and Lovecraft, can't wait to see what you do with this idea!
I'm in! Will be writing a longer poem and am super excited about it!
I'm in. I'm gonna make a magnetic wall hanging chess board and hang it near the mailboxes in my apartment building. The papers pinned to the corkboard haven't been updated since last year, so I doubt Management will mind if I add something fun.
God willing, I'll actually be able to play a game of correspondence chess with the neighbors I've never met!
I have a general idea for the board and the pieces, and I'll just have to iterate on the sizes of the pieces relative to the board. The score sheet can just be pinned to the cork board. The turn indicator will be a sliding sign, kinda like this, but I think I can make it more space efficient by having "White" on the back plate, "Black" on the sliding bit, and "to move" on a front plate. I have no idea how it's actually gonna turn out, or if it'll be intuitive to use, and I may end up just copying that design exactly and adding "to move" beneath it or something.
The hard part is gonna be the turn timer. Should I even have a turn timer? Should it be Open Chess instead of 1v1 Correspondence? Am I overthinking something that no one is likely to use in the first place? Maybe, maybe, and absolutely yes
I'm doing a short interactive fiction, either on Inkle or Twine with the chapbook format.
Inkle would be best, but it is also harder for me to manage as a non-programmer, and there are a few things that I must have.
It will likely follow a traditional Choose Your Own Adventure format, but I may add some kind of gameplay if I can. But it must be relatively easy, without moon logic or word hunt.
I'll write prose that is concise and to the point, there will be no long transitions or needles animations. Unlike most interactive fiction, I have no interest in making this feel like reading a book.
Hopefully, I'll feel confident enough to share it here. And I'll make it short and sweet so it's not a big time commitment.
EDIT: Inkle is not that hard, I'm doing the first act of my fanfiction Star Trek episode.
My 𝑻𝑰𝑴𝑨𝑺𝑶𝑴𝑶 project for this year, after debating a few alternatives, is to finish working on a software upgrade for some custom software my wife uses for research - she's a neuroscience professor and uses the software to run subjects through various motor learning tasks, but it was originally written over a decade ago and has become an increasingly layered array of hacks and copy-paste parallel copies for different tests. I'm doing a big refactoring to separate out the "business logic" layer from the parts that record data and interact with the equipment, then making the business logic portion scriptable. Hence ideally there won't need to be code changes for 90% of the experiments, just load a different experiment protocol file. So no more copy paste or spaghetti, plus I'm teaching everyone how to use Gitlab, so there will be version control outside zip files with dates for names!
Better late than never!!!
This year I'm doing something with photography, but very different from past years.
I'll be darkroom printing antique negatives! Over the last 12 months I've collected several hundred photo negatives from the 20's through the 50's. I'd love to use them to create an art piece.
I'm going to go out on a limb and try photo montage (look up Scott Mutter), something I've wanted to do for a long time but have never been confident enough to try.
I'm kinda late but I'd like to create some sort of website to track tasks, similar to Emacs' Org-Mode. I know there's other apps like Anytype, Notion, and even Org-Mode itself that already do it, but it'd still be a fun hobby project.
I'm trying to figure out web development at the moment, so I'll probably fold my existing project of making a Phutball web interface/site into this.
In terms of getting something out, the main goal will likely be "Can I play Phutball more or less intuitively on this interface" (I have an existing "functional" interface, but I will definitely need to rework it) and all the bells and whistles will follow from that.
I was last thinking about working on the back end in preparation of potentially making it a real online thing, but that will likely be a stretch goal that I probably won't have time to achieve, given the 0 progress I have made in the last week.
I'll be participating! Thank you as always for putting this together!
I'm going to be drawing an animated illustration for spooky season.
I'll be working on a chess engine + GUI in Godot 4. I'm a hobbyist and have been learning the engine for four years now. I've made several prototype-ish projects, the most notable of which was a turn based battle game, and after watching Sebastian Lague's excellent chess coding adventures videos, I've decided it's time to try my hand at chess programming. I've been playing chess for years, ever since my dad taught me as a kid (no, I still haven't beat him!). This project has been fun for the two of us because he's an IT guy with plenty of programming experience so I've been talking to him about it a lot, and he's always wanted to do this sort of thing. I just restarted the project from almost-scratch (lessons were learned) yesterday so I'm sort of starting fresh for Timasomo! I'm not trying to make the world's greatest chess computer - the goal is for it to eventually be able to beat me (1200 ish) or even my dad (1500?).
This sounds great! I'm an avid chess player myself (around 1100), so I'll be very keen to give it a go :D
Thank you! I'll be sure to post a link if/when I get it hosted somewhere!
I'm in! As I mentioned in my thread on creating time for timasomo, I'm going to be arranging, recording, and hopefully filming a metal cover of Reel Around the Sun from Riverdance. Many many moons (and one gender upgrade) ago I did the same with the theme from His Dark Materials, and this one has been rattling around my head for literally years at this stage. I'll be glad to have it out in the world!
Sounds like others will be using this as an incentive to finish WIPs, so I will too: I'm going to make (what I hope is) the last big push on my alphabet book of dictators.
Goals:
-Write/edit/polish the remaining stories
-Mock up remaining illustrations (which are analog collages, layered with resin, so)
-Final resin pours
-Final clean up/polish of page plates
-Book cover & title pages for each story
-Digitize pages (scan, photos? Not sure yet)
Stretch goal:
-Get a Kickstarter going
It's doable, in theory, but we'll see how it goes.
Three years ago when I learned to crochet I bought a bunch of yarn and started making a cardigan for my husband for Christmas. As a beginner I didn't know what I was getting into and ended up never finishing it. Every year I bring it back out and work on it a little more but I get discouraged by the mistakes (beginner me was not good at counting) and the time involved. So I suppose this is an opportunity to finish it! My husband is a big man, as he wants it long like mid thigh. So I've still got a good portion to go. By the end of the month. Hope to finish the back panel, make the arms and pockets, connect it and add the trim. My husband might finally get his cardigan for Christmas!
I am going to knit a thing. Final pattern TBD but I'm pending finding my supplies this evening.
Doing the thing! My project is a nightstand to replace the increasingly wobbly one that is currently by the bed.
On an unrelated note, what does Timasomo stand for? I'm guessing it's something like TIldes MAke SOmething MOnth given the nanowrimo inspiration.
You’re exactly right!
This made me realize I didn’t have that info anywhere in the FAQ. I’ve added it to the first question.
I've been not doing anything "creative" for awhile so i would like to at least write a short short story and update my website with some past stuff ive done but not processed.
looking forward to seeing everyone else's stuff!
Depending on how you count and whether I choose to do all the options or stick to the minimum, this is between 2–7 projects. My target deadline is Oct 25 for travel reasons. Help / suggestions for either are appreciated, especially the media server.
The writing projects
I'll commit to writing at least one of these, but I'm not sure which one will be my primary and which will be a bonus just yet. They're both gay romances set in Equestria.Technically, I have until December to finish them, but I'd prefer to finish these before travel.
Anon's Gay Adventure with a Green Kirin, or A Report on the Dangers of Subtle Dimorphism
Still workshopping that title. Whichever doesn't get picked will be a chapter title. I've written a solid start to the middle section so far. So far, the outline isBoredom BoxAcclimation FacilityTitle TBD
A series of letters between a trio of (former?) lovers as they keep in touch after graduation. Although the kirin story almost certainly will have a _much_ longer word count, this one will take more planning. Most of the action takes place off-page and is mentioned instead of described. I have some snippets, but not as much as the kirins—perhaps I'm seeing the answer that this is the bonusSetting up a media server
This isn't your traditional creative pursuit. However, it occupies the same niche for me for maintaining focus and keeping on task for a multi-day assignment.Planned steps:
Probably won't share this one publicly. It's mostly inspired by having a music collection too large to fit on an iPhone (and too many FLAC/Opus files from my Linux years to want to transcode them all for iTunes).
Again, some advice so I don't nerd-snipe myself in a research hole would be important for keeping me on track.
Months ago I wrote this series of comments with some rough game-design ideas and brainstorming about an idea I've had for a space flight-sim game, with a note that I was working on a prototype. (1) (2) (3) (4) (5) (6) (7)
I still do not have the prototype.
I did work on it, off-and-on, for a few weekends... but life has gotten in the way. I write code for a living, but don't get to write much of the low-level graphics code that I enjoyed learning about in college. Everything's strictly compute and AI nowadays. Anything graphics or visualization related we use high-level libraries. Makes sense as a business decision, but I do sometimes miss that kind of work.
I'd like this project to be a creative outlet for that. For this reason I am not using a game engine. The stack at the moment is C++ with entt, glfw, imgui, and enet. I'm using OpenGL for rendering, since I'm more familiar with it and find it easier to prototype things, but I'm careful to decouple rendering from the other systems so I might switch to Vulkan in the future if I get past this prototyping phase.
So, you can read those comments linked above for a broader idea on where I'd like to take the concept from a lore / game-mechanics perspective, but all I'm really interested in creating for Timasomo is a minimal prototype to see if physical parameters can be tuned so that combat and travel times are still engaging to a player. I'd call Timasomo a success if I can get two or more players flying around the system and shooting at each other.
For my own reference, and to hold myself accountable, here's a slightly-technical requirements list for that goal. Note I've already completed some of these, but everything so far has been more back-end (mostly networking) engine work rather than the fun interactive pieces.
The Orrery
The sun, planets, major moons, and major asteroids move on rails. Do not solve the n-body problem, but do note gravity of large bodies for ship motion. This is already done, although I'd like to import more data.Networking (the hard part)
I mean _basic_. All I need is to get two or more players flying around and shooting at each other. I don't need to handle visibility, player data, or any nuanced ship systems. The _only_ system the server will control is ship motion.Implementing the interface for this task has taken the most time from my on-and-off work so far, since I've never created a multiplayer game before. Lots of research and experimentation on what works and what doesn't. The timing of Timasomo is fortunate, since I finally have a networking system that I think is complete - hopefully all that remains is to have my physics system send and receive packets with the server to remain synchronized.
The ship controls system must send packets to the server and update the client's physics simulation.
The server must receive those packets and update its physics simulation accordingly, and rebroadcast those inputs to other clients so they can update their physics simulations.
Periodically, the server should send a synchronization packet to each client, recording the absolute ground-truth position and velocity of all players. In the future I want to implement some interpolation for these, but for Timasomo I'm perfectly fine with a jittery experience.
Since this past weekend, my networking system correctly routes packets to the relevant systems via entt's events library. I hope all that remains on this task is to have the input system publish events to the server, and have the physics system receive updates from the server. Unless there's something I don't foresee, the hard part is behind me.
Ship Physics
I've already integrate some existing physics engines (I had the most success with reactphysics3d), however none of the engines I've tried handle angular momentum correctly: see https://youtu.be/1x5UiwEEvpQ - the engines do not precess the axis of rotation. Since I want to support asymmetrical ships rotating in microgravity, it's important to me that angular momentum is correctly implemented. Therefore I need to drop reactphysics3d and write custom code for ship motion. Any energy-conserving integrator is fine for this prototype.If I ever get to the point of having human-scale physics inside ships or on celestial body surfaces, where angular momentum isn't so important, then I would prefer to use reactphysics3d in those contexts. This is not part of my goal for Timasomo.
Ship Controls
I've already implemented ship throttle and attitude controls. However, after testing those controls and given my experience in games like KSP and Elite, it's critical to have some keybind to automatically counter my angular momentum, or else the player easily becomes disoriented.It'd also be good to have some visible indicator of what the ships orientation will be once rotation stops, along with a visible indicator of the player's prograde and retrograde motion. These indicators can be drawn on the skybox, and should greatly help a player correctly perform the flip-and-burn maneuver.
Weapons (the experiment)
Correct weapon simulation and hit-detection are _not_ part of my goal for Timasomo.I want to get rough testing on how well a player can aim in space: therefore I need to leave room to fudge the physics and experiment with aim-assist methods. I don't need to simulate health or damage or weapon mounts or anything like that - all I need is to log the distance of the projectile's closest approach to its target.
The player will aim the camera, click, and a projectile is fired in the direction of line-of-sight.
I want to test parameters for a fast ballistic projectile (railgun) and an accelerating projectile with limited homing (torpedos).
I also want to test parameters for automatically leading shots; when the player clicks "fire", the game should fire the projectile in the direction that, if the target maintained course, the projectile would intercept the target at the aimed location. Basically accounting for a kind of pseudo-gravity bullet-drop. I've already done the math on how to do this intercepting logic, but obviously haven't implemented it since I don't have ship weapons working yet.
Update 1
Update 2
I was working on essentially this a decade or so ago! There are screenshots floating around on /r/gamedev, but I no longer have an easy way to find them. (edit: I found the posts, but had hosted the images on my own site, and they're not there anymore. Oh well.)
It was cool, but I never found a way to make it fun. You seem to have put a lot of thought into how to solve those problems (iirc, lasers were the big problem, we had them do the inverse square thing and added recharge delays but in the end the best strategy was still "laser all incoming missiles, then spend the rest of your time lasering your opponent")
I eventually lost interest because this was around the time I started my first job and that sucked all my time and programming energy. It was also the project that made me swear off of writing realtime multiplayer games forever.
Excited to see where this goes!
Ha! Thanks for the words of encouragement.
In brainstorming I've come to the same conclusions about lasers... I have a few ideas on how to add them in a balanced way, but I think the best solution is the laziest: do not add them. It's true that such a technology would dominate real combat, but that's the very reason it shouldn't be added to a game. It's not fun.
If you've played World of Warships at all, it's the same situation as with CVs. They dominated historical warfare, and they dominate the game for the same reasons. It's not fun. Aircraft carriers attack an enemy that can't retaliate. As a defender, there is no action you can take to defend yourself. As an attacker, you're just shooting fish in a barrel with no challenge. All the interesting gameplay comes from Battleships, Cruisers, and Destroyers; but in reality these were reserved for bombardment and... escorting aircraft carriers.
So the only way I would consider adding laser combat is if the defender has means to defend themself. I mention a few ideas in (1) and (2). I've also considered inverse-square (or even fudging numbers with inverse-cube or similar) and cooldowns. However none of those solve the core issue: there's no counterplay.
The one idea I've had that seems to have some merit, is to lean heavily into thermal management. If I can grant science-fiction torch ships to the game, I can also grant science-fiction active radiators. In reality, all ships would emit IR blackbody radiation, much warmer than the microwave background radiation, so everyone should see everyone all the time. There's no stealth. That's boring.
Instead, I grant magical science-fiction thermal management so the player can control which directions their heat is radiated, and they are invisible in the directions they do not radiate heat. At X throttle, each ship's reactor generates Y units of heat which must be radiated away using the limited capacity of the radiators present on the ship. The player may select which radiators are in use, or reorient their ship, to avoid radiating heat toward their enemy. Invest in better radiators to have improved stealth at higher throttle, or forgo strong radiators for a "glass cannon" type build. The player can choose to make that tradeoff.
All a laser does - I'm simplifying here, but I think it's a fine model for a video game - is to deposit thermal energy into the target. If your thermal management system can radiate as much or more energy than the laser deposits, you're fine. That does consume thermal management capacity, though, so it would limit your maximum throttle or stealth.
The counterplay to lasers becomes this: adjust thermal management. Invest less in weaponry and more in radiators. Lower your throttle so you have more radiation capacity. Direct energy away from the attacker so they cannot track you. This gives the defender some options, but it does still limit what they can safely do. The attacker is no longer shooting fish in a barrel either, the laser becomes a tool for denying access to certain maneuvers. You can impede your opponent, but you can't kill them with lasers alone if they're paying attention.
There are still questions that give me pause, though. Could a group of players all select lasers and easily overpower their target? Could a player use multiple lasers at once? How should lasers interact with projectiles? How much energy does a laser draw?
Interesting. You're going in almost the exact opposite direction.
We* spent a lot of our brainstorming time on ways to make things less stealthy, because in early playtests we'd fly off in different directions and never find each other. We had magic space radar (and EMPs to disable it temporarily, at the cost of also messing up your own radar), a limited battlefield size outside of which your ship would automatically turn around and fly back in, and automatic targeting and guided missiles that were frankly too good*.
* I'm alternating between "I" and "we" in these posts for a reason: I was the main person working on it and by far the more talented programmer, but I had a friend with Strong Opinions On Spacecraft, and an advanced degree in spacecraft control theory to back them up, as a co-developer.
edit:
In real life, they also generate a lot of heat (non-toy cutting lasers, and presumably weapon lasers, generally need water cooling or more). If you're leaning that hard into thermal management, why not make the ship firing the laser also need to dump that heat somewhere?
Yes! That's the idea behind including rich thermal management. From a game design perspective it adds a sort of "action points" resource that the players must manage. Investing in radiators provides you more "action points" but at the tradeoff of fewer surface-mount devices (weapons, point-defense, radar, armor, etc).
Lasers become a tool like "spend X action points to deny the enemy Y action points". It's a tradeoff for the attacker, and it's not immediately fatal to the defender.
To be clear, when your main drive is burning, everyone behind you will see it. The stealth mechanics would only apply to the sides and forward, or when the main drive is off. Notably, when intercepting a target, you must decelerate with the main drive at some point, which necessarily involves revealing your position.
I hope this leads to more interesting strategies. For example, to hide your position from the target you could intentionally over-shoot, and only begin deceleration after you pass the target. This gives you a disadvantages as your projectiles would have less relative velocity to the target, but the element of surprise might be worth it to some players. The whole maneuver would take more time overall, too.
I'm curious what exactly your dimensions and timescales were. When you say targeting and guidance are too good, that gives me the impression your battlefield was too small.
With this project, I want to explore the real scale of space. Games like No Man's Sky, Elite, Starfield, KSP don't feel like they're at scale, because they all have fast travel. More specifically, they have variable timescales. Starfield has shameless fast-travel, where an indeterminate amount of time passes in a few seconds of gameplay. Elite and No Man's Sky use warp drive, but that's not much better: an indeterminate distance passes in a few seconds of gameplay. KSP's time-warp is the best of them, but it's still variable.
Numerically, spending 5 minutes at 10000x time-warp covers a far greater distance than 5 minutes at 10x time-warp. But to the player, they feel the same. Ironically, because of the altitude limits of time-warp, a single low-Kerbin orbit takes longer than the Hohmann transfer to the Mun. That's so backwards.
The way I'd try to make space feel big, but remain playable, is to have a fixed timescale (60x) and boost accelerations by a fixed factor (5x). Those numbers can be tuned, but they should produce reasonable travel times for gameplay. Critically, they scale with distance. See the math here. A journey from Earth to Moon takes less than 2 mins of gameplay, but a journey from Jupiter to Saturn can take up to 2 hours of non-stop travel. If anything, I think that's not long enough, and I might reduce the acceleration boost.
The dynamics of combat in my concept should be more similar to ship-to-ship combat in Sea of Thieves, or energy-fighting in traditional flight simulators. A player might be doing some mission or visiting some point of interest, when a fast-moving attacker plots an intercept course on that player. The attacker's objective is to limit the target's maneuverability, then immobilize or destroy the target to steal resources, complete some bounty, or whatever else. The target's objective is to escape or destroy the attacker.
I'm not trying to build a combat arena where opponents maneuver at relatively low speed to win a match or complete some objective. There may be fights for control over points of interest, but any player should have the option to run away - and the other players should have the option to pursue. Rarely would players be moving at low speed relative to each other, and rarely would enemies (voluntarily) come to close distances.
I'm not very concerned about it for this Timasomo prototype, but something that's critical is to make controls intuitive. It must be easy for a player to chart an intercept course to any celestial body or opponent without much preparation. I'd prefer to avoid requiring a separate "map view" as in KSP to chart an intercept course. Any map view should be reserved for observing relative positions of planets, moons, and players in order to plan ahead, not to chart particular intercept courses. That's no easy feat but I do have some ideas, borrowing certain navigation features from other similar games.
Particular features to highlight for inspiration:
World of Warships (battleship gameplay)
War Thunder (arcade mode gameplay)
Kerbal Space Program (gameplay)
Ahh, that's the big difference then. The thing I'm describing was definitely a fastish-paced combat arena type thing. Still very interested in your thing though.
I don't remember exact numbers - they were mostly just tuned to make it feel right - but much smaller than what you're working with. For a vague sense of scale:
We were trying to balance "space is empty and big" with trying to keep it interesting as a combat arena game. If you're not trying to do that second thing, then yeah, you can make it a lot more empty and big.
I'm in too! I plan to make a few dresses for "to throw on" when I need to go out.
I'm also going to make my dog's halloween costume.
A day late, but I'm in! I'm going to make a photo zine.
This is actually a sub-project of a larger goal I have for myself: reviewing and curating the 1000s of edited photographs I have and making something that resembles a portfolio. I've been distracted from this project, and I think giving myself some motivation and deadlines will help me along.
I found this company that makes custom newsprint booklets: https://www.newspaperclub.com/. I was thinking of gathering a thematic series of photographs, designing the layout and writing any text to include, and getting a fairly small batch printed up that I can share with people. I like the newsprint medium: it's relatively low-stakes and low-cost, so a good way for me to get my feet wet doing this (instead of paying a lot more for nice glossy paper, or something like that).
I'm not sure of the exact scope right now, but I'm thinking of curating 20-25 photos for the zine. Maybe if I feel there's something missing, I can take some more new ones. I think that black and white would work best with newsprint, so that's where I'm going to start.
I’m so in!
My plan is to paint - in their entirety - a couple (at minimum, more if time and effort affords) of Warhammer 40k and Warhammer Age of Sigmar models I have that are currently languishing in states ranging from nearly done to basically unstarted.
For the purposes of goal setting, here’s the models:
Necron Canoptek stalker: cool spindly legged robot thing. The colour/aesthetic scheme I’m going for is a kind of deep-sea-cross-deep-space-nebulae green-silver-purple. Trying to evocative some Lovecraftian space vibes. The legs are maybe, 60% done? The vast majority of the body, shells and various supporting accoutrements, shading OSL lighting etc to go.
Pack of 3 Seraphon Aggradon riders, basically lizards riding larger lizards? The big lizards are being done in a 2-tone emerald green with a cream-white underbelly, and gold-and-blue jewellery. The little lizards are going to be done in a 2-tone cerulean-blue scheme with red scale highlights, and the same style jewellery. These models are significantly more involved than the walker, with more small pieces and details but should be fun to pain and practice lots of techniques on.
Never participated before but this sounds fun!
I'm going to write a short (~5m) orchestral piece, based on an 'image'. Something to do with snow and mountains, I'll work out the details as I go along. Maybe one day I'll make it into a multi-movement suite, but right now I'll limit myself to one good bit of music. 5 minutes of orchestral writing from scratch in a month will be a challenge, but I always work best with deadlines, so I'm confident I'll get it done in time.
Bonus: I might also arrange it for 2 pianos, for no other reason than it's next to impossible to get orchestral music performed without having an 'example version' to show people first.
I am late to the party but here it is:
I will try to create a minimalist app for analyzing training data (at least a very basic prototype).
I am a data analyst and also an avid amateur athlete (cycling). I am also a bit of a control freak and I don't love any of the apps out there - Strava, Garmin Connect, TrainingPeaks etc. - they all feel cluttered (GoldenCheetah) and at the same time not flexible enough to do any real analysis in terms of playing with the data.
It is not an easy problem though - I know what I don't like but I am not sure how to do it right (I just have some ideas that are still pretty fuzzy). However, I cannot let it go and I keep thinking about it. I only just found out about timasomo and when I was reading about it, I felt a surge of energy - dude, this is the time when you finally get to it and start working on it!
I'm late. I've had ongoing project to build a language server protocol implementation of a plugin I dearly miss from an editor I haven't used in years. It's a project that I've been thinking sporadically for most of the year, barely started in back in Spring, and haven't touched since. This was also meant as a learning project to learn Rust for the first time, so progress has been slow.
I'm extremely time constrained this month, so I'm going to scope down and just make my goal "make some progress". The scale of the project has felt daunting, so the hope is that Timasomo opens the floodgates to me gradually chipping away at this.
I've set an itsy-bitsy little milestone for this month.
Better late than never!!!
This year I'm doing something with photography, but very different from past years.
I'll be darkroom printing antique negatives! Over the last 12 months I've collected several hundred photo negatives from the 20's through the 50's. I'd love to use them to create an art piece.
I'm going to go out on a limb and try photo montage (look up Scott Mutter), something I've wanted to do for a long time but have never been confident enough to try.
That sounds super cool! Where do you get antique negatives? I've always loved the look of old photography but I don't even know where to find non-famous examples.
I stumbled across a set on eBay and discovered quite a few listings for them. It seems like most of them come from estate sales.
So far all of them have come in their original envelopes (people used mail to get film developed) with the old postage stamps!
My favorite set is 12 glass plate negatives, in their original cardboard box, manufactured some time between 1882-1902. They are in unbelievable condition. I'm currently trying to find a museum to donate them too, since I'm worried I don't have the resources to properly preserve them.
Wow - this sounds amazing. Will be following along for sure!
As mentioned in the Announcement thread plan is to get the Tercel back together enough to get it on the ground (if only briefly, more on this later) own it's own wheels.
General plans to reach goal
Off the top of my head, roughly in the correct order, things that need to be done:
Nice to accomplish this month, but not necessary to get it on the ground
Challenges/step backward before we even start
So remember how I mentioned that an impromptu guys' day resulted in the engine and trans being mated and put into the car?
Well impromptu, spontaneous things when I'm not following my checklists can result in missing steps. Like not being sure if the throwout bearing was actually installed on the transmission before putting it together, the guys also confirming that they didn't look for it nor remember it being there, and it still being inconclusive when searching for it via endoscope through the starter hole.
So that means I have to take the engine and transmission back out and separate them again to check for it, putting us back at square zero as merely hoping it's there only makes it harder to remove it all later if I turn out to be right about it not being in place.
Another challenge to all of this is I am back in blacksmithing class now. So the first half of each Saturday is already accounted for and, generally speaking, the latter half is, more often than not, taken as well with plans with friends, my wife, errands, or the like. So my weekends to work on the Tercel are largely limited to Sundays only.
I had intended to get started yesterday, October 1st, as it is officially TiMaSoMo, but I was quite worn out from a hot day in blacksmithing (drank nearly a gallon of water over the course of 4 hours) that was followed by what was supposed to be a quick task working on one of the guys' cars that turned into an nine hour ordeal (the car does run now at least). So I took Sunday "off" and only ran errands and meal prepped.
I am joining once again! I have created a Ludum Dare game this weekend and I really liked how the game ended up so I'd like to continue working on it. So I'll use Timasomo to work on the game. I would really like to stay with the same project for the whole month. I have made many games, but I have never finished a game (solo :D) that I'd actually like to release on Steam or a platform like that, so I'd really really like to have this game be that.
And now, instead of talking about my grandiose plans like I'd like to do, I'll go work on the game right now!
I want to create a board game. I've got an idea about reconciliation and (probably?) Northern Ireland that's been floating around in my head for a while, but I'd like it to not just be floating around in my head and start existing in the real world.
A whole board game in a month is probably a bit beyond me, but at least having a physical playable prototype by the end of the month seems like a good goal. And maybe a TTS/Screentop version as well.
This sounds fun! I'm going to use it as an incentive to finally finish a project that's been languishing in my laundry room for months. It's a stained glass window memorial for my dad's parrot that passed away earlier this year. I have all the glass cut but still need to grind and assemble the thing. Hopefully since it's a small, manageable chunk of work, I can finish it by the end of the month.
As a stretch goal, I'll try putting together custom climate sensors for each room in my house. I've wanted to do that project for years but just never can find the time. The biggest hurdle there is figuring out how to use a 3D printer to make cases for whatever soldering-induced crime-against-electronics I wind up with.